Affective Interaction and Memes in Online
Learning Environments This item will give you something
knotty to think about over the weekend. This interesting -
and yet puzzling - website describes a study designed to
look at the relation between memes and learning. The idea
of the study, as expressed by the author, involves "looking
beyond IT solutions such as 'virtual' environments and
'intelligent' machines, towards an online education model
which might be affect-centred rather than content-centred -
and the idea that the answers might lie, not in the medium,
the technology or the 'virtual' spaces, but in the minds of
the users of the online systems - that there must be a
conceptual framework which could facilitate this process."
There is something deeply right about this line of thinking
and a lot of what the author is proposing here forms a
backdrop for my own discussions of online learning. A
tough, engaging piece of research - put the coffee on and
prepare to linger (note: the user interface is very
difficult - you have to click on the yellow box *twice* in
a given section to get the detailed discussion). By John
Laurie, University of Wollongong, June, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Journal of
Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis The cynic
would say that the journals on this site mean that honesty
has finally come to science. I'm not so extreme, but I do
recognize the need for more balance in the literature and
thus welcome the launch of Journal of Articles in Support
of the Null Hypothesis and its sister publication, the
Index of Null Effects and Replication Failures. Finally, a
place to publish your experimental results even when they
don't show anything. By Various Authors, Reysen Group,
June, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Why Aren't We Collaborating? The point of
this article is to examine the question of why people
aren't collaborating online. But I challenge that
assumption. I spend a good chunk of every day reading and
writing email to people around the world. This, to me,
counts as collaboration. Why must we assume, as the author
does, that collaborating online means buying expensive
collaboration software? The business case for this software
is not nearly as clear as the author assumes: if a good
email will do the trick, why schedule a multipoint internet
conference. Let's use common sense here. By David
Weinberger, Darwin Online, July 2, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Technology Costing Methodology Project
How much does educational technology cost? It's hard to
say, but this new tool may help put a number on these
investments. The project is a costing analysis tool for
schools to use to analyze the costs of instructional
approaches that make heavy use of technology, and to
compare
cost data for different instructional approaches. By
Various Authors, Western Interstate Commission for Higher
Education, December 31, 200-31 8:33 p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]